SAPPHIRENOW 2011 Report Out day 1 – BusinessObjects 4.x is pretty cool


Before I say anything about the event – let me say this : Big thanks to Mike Prosceno, Mark Finnern, Aslan N, Stacy Fish, Craig Cmehil and Andrea Kaufmann . Without them – I would not have had the awesome experience I had. THANKS !!!

So here is the report out – and as always, like all my blogs, this is just my personal view and not of my employer.

Here I am at Orlando Airport at 5AM, on my way back home from PHX. As always, it was a lot of fun to catch up with all my buddies from all over the world. This year was extra special since I had the pleasure of meeting the other 3 SAP Mentors from IBM – Somnath, Dipankar and Abesh at SAPPHIRE. Quite a nice way to celebrate our Pinnacle Award .

I wore 3 hats to SAPPHIRE – as an IBMer, as an SAP Mentor, and as a blogger.

I had to work at the booth, meet customers and introduce them to all the cool things SAP is bringing to market. We had spent some time building our demos for BI/BO and it was gratifying to see customers and SAP appreciating that.

As a mentor, I got the new mentor tie  which I proudly sported all of Monday.Thanks to my friend Beverly Tomb for the photo.

And on evenings – except for Sting concert, I traded the suit and tie for the mentor shirt. I could not attend all the Mentor meetings Mark Finnern so kindly arranged. There just wasn’t enough time, and my schedule was quite out of hand. I could clearly see how much visibility the mentor program has now compared to when it started.

This was the first year I went to SAPPHIRE as a blogger. SAP paid my airfare and hotel to attend SAPPHIRE. Getting a room at the Hilton, which was connected to the convention center was quite nice. Best part was we had a great place in the 19th floore executive lounge to shoot videos with Jon Reed and Dennis Howlett – the forces behind the excellent JD-OD.com venture.

On Monday, fellow mentor David Hull of Disney joined me to get interviewed on SAP TV. I have a new found respect for all the people who go through this. It was not as intimidating at the end since the technicians and organizers were super friendly and professional. It was a brief shoot, and I think we managed to finish it without embarrassing ourselves 🙂 . Some day that video should show up here http://www.sapphirenow.com/sessiondetails.aspx?sId=242

On Monday afternoon, I had a chance to meet with George Mathew, an executive in the BO side of the house. I already knew George from before via phone, email and twitter – so it was easy to get right to business on topics of interest – specifically mobile BI or MOBI. He is quite articulate, and I believe will rise much higher in his career. Not just George, I met several other executives this time that gave me the impression that SAP has great bench strength to keep feeding the leadership pipeline. It is a big deal – well done SAP.

OK – so back to MOBI. SAP bought BusinessObjects and Sybase, but SUP and MOBI are not integrated , and I had asked that question many times before. George tells me that this will happen towards end of this year. I think it is a pre-requisite for SAP to scale its mobility offerings. The other  major questions – which both John Appleby and I had for George, was offline analytics and agile BI. For offline –  SAP has some offline features in MOBI today – which will be available to customers soon, which George demonstrated on his tablet. However, there is still a gap – there is no solution today where by a user can get a dataset downloaded to his laptop or other mobile device, to analyze offline – say during a plane ride. SAP is fully aware and working on it according to George. There wasn’t a clear answer on the Agile BI thing . George did say SAP has no plans to buy an existing vendor to get over this gap.

We asked George about how the smaller companies will make use of BO suite – since the pricepoint is not very friendly for those customers. I don’t think we got a crisp answer on what SAP will do to change it, although it was amply clear that they understand the challenge.

The prebuilt analytic apps that came out from Keith Costello’s team will all get repurposed to work on HANA. This is great news – and I am looking forward to understanding how the existing BAS architecture will morph into one that HANA can use effectively.

George confirmed that SAP did not find any performance degradation with the new common semantic layer. I am sure that is a great piece of news to a lot of customers going to the 4.x versions of BO. More over, the long term plan is to get rest of SAP suite , including OLTP applications to work with common semantic layer.

We finished the official part of Monday with a recap video session that Dennis recorded with me and Harald Reiter. Dennis is quite professional in his video production. Next time, I should learn a few tricks from him. Pls check out http://www.jd-od.com for exceptional videos on demand.

http://www.viddler.com/explore/dahowlett/videos/48/

Some of you might have heard that my employer, IBM, won the Pinnacle Award for Community Leadership and Social Commerce Engagement .   I saw the award displayed at the IBM booth – and it looked pretty cool. We have 4 SAP mentors at IBM, and all of us were at SAPPHIRENOW and we took a nice picture of all of us, with Beverly Tomb taking the photo – who many know as @IBMSAPAlliance on twitter.  I am not wearing the mentor shirt, but I was wearing the mentor lemon button on my coat lapel.  Although I did not see the Award being presented to IBM, Mark Yolton assured me that he took excellent care of the IBM executives SAP invited to the event.  Thanks Mark !

What do I expect to learn at SAPPHIRENOW 2011?


I am typing this from my flight to JFK from PHX. The next long trip on the cards is to MCO for SAPPHIRE NOW which is fast approaching. Having flown millions of miles, and having attended a good many SAP events – it is only apt that it is in a flight that I got to write a prequel to SAP’s mega event for 2011. What doesn’t help is the turbulence we are hitting while I am trying to type:)

Ever since the current Co-CEO’s took charge, I have heard a consistent message on SAP’s “On Premise, On Demand, On Device” story. It is a good thing too in my opinion, for a statement on strategy.

On Demand and On Device is where I see the most action now from SAP’s side. However, the big question my customers have is “What are the big innovations on existing On premises solutions, where we have already invested big $$?”. I expect SAP to give a clear answer to this at SAPPHIRE. SAP is big on design thinking and agile and all – so I am sure there is a crisp message to be delivered.

Next up – my favorite topic, HANA. I expect to see some firm dates for 1.0 GA, and 1.5 and 2.0 ramp/GA. I also want to know when HANA will support ABAP. SAP shops are generally skilled in ABAP, but less so in pure SQL. In its current form, HANA needs serious SQL skills and knowledge of tables. Having sold R/3 for ages on the message that “you don’t need to know tables and SQL”, it is a big change for customers to be thrown into other end of the spectrum. Again, I am sure there are good answers – and I hope we will hear on this from SAP. It would also be nice to know how many customers have gone live on HANA in production.

And while we are on the topic, when will HANA on cloud be available?
Hardware is growing at a terrific pace – if you blink, you will see 128 core blades are there and cheap 🙂 It is hard to keep up and extract value for most customers. Any smart solutions? And is the HANA software intellient enough to make use of the improved hardware as time progresses? Can it make use of more memory and processing power (scaling up/out etc). A follow on question will be HANA’s speed over networks – not all users sit close to a data center. So are there benchmarks available that shows performance across a realistic number of network hops?

Onwards to on-demand. I already blogged about my concern on the offline usage scenarios. Essentially, salesmen are not always wired. How will SAP support their OLTP and OLAP needs when they are offline? I also want to know how SAP will support integration between all the OD applications that they are developing. Or do they expect customers and SIs to do this?

Also, who is SAP targetting for non-ByD OD solutions as customer base? From what little I have heard – it looks to be targeted at big companies with operations in “developed” world. But for the most part, existing user base can be productive without new solutions in OD. Question is – what is SAP doing to help companies expand into new markets in Asia, Africa etc? Will it support multiple languages? How will we get information into an enterprise BI system from OD?

Finally, how is SAP addressing the problem in the market that SAP projects take too long? In past events, I have seen a lot of good talk on Agile and Design thinking as magic bullets. If that is the case, why is SAP not taking that approach to customers and partners and make them succesful? Is SAP doing agile in their consulting gigs?

I am going with an open mind, and hope to hear SAP executives answering all these questions .

SAP’s on-demand solutions – what if I am offline ?


Over the last couple of weeks, there has been an overload of news about cool stuff happening on SAP’s On-demand and mobile world, especially the sales on demand solution. From what I have read so far, SAP should be genuinely proud of every thing they are doing in these important areas. But, in all this frenzy – from SAP and from the folks who commented on it – I wonder why I don’t see anything about the offline aspects of the sales function.

A sales person is usually NOT connected to internet all the time. A good many of them actually do data entry stuff  on plane  rides etc.  And only a small fraction of planes have internet connections. So, these people  have to put information into spreadsheets etc – and then if their boss pushes them hard, they will grudgingly type it into a system of record some time.  Some of them I know will probably do it only if their commission is predicated on such data entry 🙂

Which reminds me  – does sales on demand also have a place for sales guys to do their expense reports? I seriously think it should. If not for anything else, at least it will be enough to get these people to use the on-demand solution, and then might have an interest in trying the “sales” part of it too.

On-demand solutions also need an offline feature to it to make them successful.  Otherwise, however nifty a solution is, it just won’t get used by sales people. Can sales on-demand system sync with excel sheets (or some other data store) in a drive on  a laptop and keep itself updated?

The necessity of offline capability is not just true for transactional use – it is equally true for analytical use too.  A lot of sales people use excel as a BI tool – precisely because they cannot access required info all the time when they are traveling.  Most them have a (painful) process to dump data into excel periodically into their PC – probably on weekly basis.

So question for SAP – what is your plan to address this? Does sales on demand have an offline reporting tool that keeps information offline on a device? Since these devices have a lot of memory and processing power these days, why not give a powerful offline reporting solution that can periodically sync with the on-demand system?

Finally, about bandwidth. It is a big constraint for making business work on mobile devices. Not all countries have the luxury of high bandwidth wireless connections. And I doubt if that scenario will grow at the speed memory and processing power improves. So, my question here – what are you doing to harness the power of client side machines? With HANA – SAP has a clear idea on what to do on server side. But what about the advances in mobile devices – how is SAP planning to harness that?

Since SAP is big on design thinking, I am sure they have got good answers on all of this. I am looking forward to getting better educated on this topic.